We all know the prevailing wisdom: "the 80's were the worst, blah blah i'm a cool guy" WELL, NO. After going through massive amounts of music from the 1960's and 70's, I want somewhere else to go, and forward seems like the natural choice. Anyway, while doing some research into these couple of years, I'm discovering that the 1980's has a lot of great stuff to offer. So, I'm looking forward to talking about and discovering more from this oft-neglected decade. Now kick back, grab a Crystal Pepsi, and tell me about your favorite music from 1980-1989 - song, album, artist, whatever.

XTC, one of my old favorites, made a lot of great records in this decade. One that I was just listening today and really enjoy was this, English Settlement:

The band begin to move toward a complex, detailed approach with this album, while also moving towards an acoustic, pastoral sound as well. The fist half of the album is filled with brilliant songs from both Andy and Colin, like "Senses Working Overtime" (if you don't like that song, I will fight you), "Ball and Chain", "All of a Sudden (It's Too Late), and "Jason and the Argonauts". The album is filled with complex, unique songwriting that results in what often feels like miniature adventures. Perhaps taking a few cues from Remain in Light (ooh, another 80's album!), the second half of the album has quite a bit of percussion and finds Andy exploring some political and societal themes. The album ends on a high note called "Snowman", with interesting music, melodies, and effects that give you the feeling of frosty weather.

What comes through with this album is how good these guys were at songwriting. The music is so unique and excellently put together, tons of great melodies, riffs, bass lines, harmonies, etc. Not to mention lyrics, which are uniformly great and include lines like "People will always be tempted to wipe their feet, on anything with 'welcome' written on it" and "All of a sudden, we find that we've lost love, so please don't push or shove because, it's too late, in all your hurry you've accidentally locked the gate". This album is the product of four, talented young men brimming with ideas and a new direction to take their music in.

A band called The Beach Boys are mostly going to be a fun in the sun-themed group. And that has, is, and will always be just as it should. There needs to be ONE classic band that isn't a pack of endless "artistic" moan. All people wanna do is make The Beach Boys into another Beatles they are less tired of.And, for anyone who has actually experienced them, surfing and cars carry PLENTY of emotion and life experience. They can carry as much metaphor as any Van Dyke Parks clever epistle.

There is (and was, and ever shall be) great music and bad music and mediocre music. The usually it has seemed that recently passed decades are the least beloved, then the nostalgia or ironic or sincere rediscovery jumpstarts their reputations again. The music, recorded, doesn't seem to notice and just goes on existing as it ever did.

This is one that I've discovered recently. I'm no great fan of synth pop, but I'm definitely interested in their work starting with Colour of Spring. I've listened to a couple songs, "Life's What You Make It", "Chameleon Day", and "April 5th", and like them very much. I'm definitely going to buy that album next time I find it. I'm not sure how I feel about Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock just yet, but if I like Colour of Spring, I'll probably end up getting those two.

This is one that I've discovered recently. I'm no great fan of synth pop, but I'm definitely interested in their work starting with Colour of Spring. I've listened to a couple songs, "Life's What You Make It", "Chameleon Day", and "April 5th", and like them very much. I'm definitely going to buy that album next time I find it. I'm not sure how I feel about Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock just yet, but if I like Colour of Spring, I'll probably end up getting those two.

Yes indeed, The Colour of Spring is the best place to start and then (if you wish) work your way backwards to the pop songs of It's My Life and the synth pop of The Party's Over and forwards to the atmospheric SOE (particularly the magnificent "Inheritance" and "I Believe In You") and the icy wastes of LS.

This is one that I've discovered recently. I'm no great fan of synth pop, but I'm definitely interested in their work starting with Colour of Spring. I've listened to a couple songs, "Life's What You Make It", "Chameleon Day", and "April 5th", and like them very much. I'm definitely going to buy that album next time I find it. I'm not sure how I feel about Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock just yet, but if I like Colour of Spring, I'll probably end up getting those two.

Yes indeed, The Colour of Spring is the best place to start and then (if you wish) work your way backwards to the pop songs of It's My Life and the synth pop of The Party's Over and forwards to the atmospheric SOE (particularly the magnificent "Inheritance" and "I Believe In You") and the icy wastes of LS.

You're both right. Start with The Colour of Spring. Their best album. Then go backwards, before going forward. Mark Hollis became so minimalist, that by the time he recorded his lone solo album he was hardly even there. There's some great songs on the early 12" records too, that are not found on the long-players. I have everything they did on vinyl, but on CD just the Mark Hollis solo and the Talk Talk natural history best of. In 2007 they added a DVD to that on the import version on EMI. You want that. Those videos are fantastic - MTV made these cats stars. Some of them must be up on youtube. They also have a great live DVD: Live At Montreux 11 July, 1986 - with "Call In the Night Boy" "My Foolish Friend" "Give It Up" "Living in Another World" and "It's My Life" as highlights. This is The Colour of Spring tour. They never toured again.

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...if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. ~ P.L. Travers And, let's get this out of the way now, everything I post is my opinion. ~ Will

Mark Hollis became so minimalist, that by the time he recorded his lone solo album he was hardly even there.

Speaking of perfect descriptions... Someone from a Dutch TV station wanted to interview Hollis about his solo album but it was as if he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He was unfindable. He'd literally melted into the crowd.

XTC, one of my old favorites, made a lot of great records in this decade. One that I was just listening today and really enjoy was this, English Settlement:

The band begin to move toward a complex, detailed approach with this album, while also moving towards an acoustic, pastoral sound as well. The fist half of the album is filled with brilliant songs from both Andy and Colin, like "Senses Working Overtime" (if you don't like that song, I will fight you), "Ball and Chain", "All of a Sudden (It's Too Late), and "Jason and the Argonauts". The album is filled with complex, unique songwriting that results in what often feels like miniature adventures. Perhaps taking a few cues from Remain in Light (ooh, another 80's album!), the second half of the album has quite a bit of percussion and finds Andy exploring some political and societal themes. The album ends on a high note called "Snowman", with interesting music, melodies, and effects that give you the feeling of frosty weather.

What comes through with this album is how good these guys were at songwriting. The music is so unique and excellently put together, tons of great melodies, riffs, bass lines, harmonies, etc. Not to mention lyrics, which are uniformly great and give toss of lines like "People will always be tempted to wipe their feet, on anything with 'welcome' written on it" and "All of a sudden, we find that we've lost love, so please don't push or shove because, it's too late, in all your hurry you've accidentally locked the gate". This album is the product of four, talented young men brimming with ideas and a new direction to take their music in.

There, now someone else go.

Yeah I love XTC too. I forgot to include Skylarking to my list. I love 'Grass' and 'That's Really Super, Supergirl".

When I think about what was great in the 80's music scene, I remember the (2nd) great wave of British artists, and the one that came right to mind when I read Bubbly's post last night, was Elvis Costello. An artist still at the top of the game. I mostly bought his singles in the 70's, but he turned for the third stretch in 1980 - leaving behind most of the field of Brits*, even his mentor Nick Lowe. Get Happy!! was the first album I bought of his, and the first time I saw one of his tours. Trust was even better. Being a big fan of Country music, I was a bit surprised when he went to Nashville to record Almost Blue. He had done some country-ish tracks before but not on this level. Later the tracks he did in hope of getting George Jones to record an album with him did get out in the early 90's. When Costello wasn't on tour, he was in a studio somewhere. So right after the Nashville sessions in May 1981 that gave us Almost Blue, he started punching out demos in August - He was so prolific, when did he find the time to write? Sessions proper began in November at AIR Studios, London for what to me is his all-time masterpiece:

* Not McCartney or xtc - they deserve their own posts, as Bubbly has already pointed out one of.

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...if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. ~ P.L. Travers And, let's get this out of the way now, everything I post is my opinion. ~ Will

When I think about what was great in the 80's music scene, I remember the (2nd) great wave of British artists, and the one that came right to mind when I read Bubbly's post last night, was Elvis Costello. An artist still at the top of the game. I mostly bought his singles in the 70's, but he turned for the third stretch in 1980 - leaving behind most of the field of Brits*, even his mentor Nick Lowe. Get Happy!! was the first album I bought of his, and the first time I saw one of his tours. Trust was even better. Being a big fan of Country music, I was a bit surprised when he went to Nashville to record Almost Blue. He had done some country-ish tracks before but not on this level. Later the tracks he did in hope of getting George Jones to record an album with him did get out in the early 90's. When Costello wasn't on tour, he was in a studio somewhere. So right after the Nashville sessions in May 1981 that gave us Almost Blue, he started punching out demos in August - He was so prolific, when did he find the time to write? Sessions proper began in November at AIR Studios, London for what to me is his all-time masterpiece:

* Not McCartney or xtc - they deserve their own posts, as Bubbly has already pointed out one of.

Thanks for this. I was hoping more people would post like this, y'know, giving some information and detailing what they like about their favorites. Anyway, I've always been a little indifferent to the one Costello album I have, This Year's Model, but - now that I have my computer back - I'll listen to this one soon.

R.E.M.'s first five albums: Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, Document (also the EP Chronic Town). With the exceptions of Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-fi, hardly anything else in their discography even comes close.John Lennon/Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. I like the homespun quality of Lennon's songs here and prefer them to some of his more famous work in the 1970s; I like quite a few of the Ono songs as well.George Harrison: Someone already said Cloud 9, but I'll throw the wrongly vilified Gone Troppo. Also The Traveling Wilburys Volume One.Stevie Wonder: Hotter Than July and Characters. Admittedly a much less impressive decade for Stevie than the 70s was, but these are still two great albums. In Square Circle has some pretty great music on it, too, but quite a bit of mediocre music as well.Marvin Gaye: In Our Lifetime and Midnight Love. The former may be my favorite Marvin Gaye album, (particularly "Love Party," dance music for the apocalypse).Van Dyke Parks: Jump! A great blend of musical styles and one of the most effectively narrative albums I've heard.

And then, of course, the pinnacle of musical achievement, Lookin' Back with Love.

Nobody here, or anywhere else for that matter, needs me to list out albums from the '80s that hit everyone's best of all time. We all have access to those lists. Maybe that is what Bubbly wants--that or at least recommendations. I'm not sure I want to give a recommendation. Instead I reminisced a little bit about that decade and how I thought about music then. Of what I loved at the time, barely of any of it remains in high esteem (by me, I mean). Graceland and Prince's stuff are probably the only things that were beloved then and now. Other things, like Waits's stuff, I came to well after the fact.

But f*** all that. Here's something else. Here's Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry................In 1980s rural Minnesota, the almost literal witch hunt for satanism in rock music felt like an obsession. For those of us listening to that purportedly satanic rock music, it was terrifying.

A prepubescent, newly fascinated connoisseur of hard rock and metal struggled in a very conservative Christian household. Songs with curse words were to be played quietly--contrary to every instinct--or through headphones. Album covers with scantily clad women had to be kept out of sight. Most of all, anything looking or sounding satanic had to be disavowed entirely. "I listen to hard rock, mom," the kid would say, "but I don't like that satanic stuff."

The problem in the American influenced by Tipper Gore, the Peters Brothers, and television journalists ready to jump on the dream story of teenage suicides inspired by satanic cults--and yes, they seemed insistent these things existed--was that "satanic" meant damn near everything more risqué than Stryper or Petra. Long hair, torn or tight clothes, men in makeup, obviously any religious imagery whatsoever, anything more reasonably categorized as fantasy (e.g., elves, wizards and the like), any sentiment questioning the merits of a Reagan-era American dream: satanic. Or at least under heavy suspicion.

When Pee-Wee's Big Adventure featured a scene that included Twisted Sister filming a video for their "Burn in Hell," I was placed in a very awkward position. Number one, even saying hell outside of the context of church was an issue in my home. One could just as well have said fucking c***. But number two, a song whose refrain threatened that you'd burn in hell, well, that was pure satanism. Simple as that. My mom didn't have to hear anything else. Not "welcome to the abandoned land. Come on in, child, take my hand. Here, there's no work or play. Only one bill to pay. There's just five words to say as you go down, down down."

Just "you're gonna burn in hell," sung by these ugly men garishly dolled up in absurd makeup and feathered or fringed costumes.

I was so f***ed.

See, by this time--1985--I knew Stay Hungry, the 1984 album on which "Burn in Hell" appeared. Like, really well. I owned the cassette several times, wearing it out from overuse. I considered it the greatest album of all time, or at least in a tight competition with Van Halen's 1984. I was 11 years old.

In the same way that KISS would affect me around the same time or soon after, Twisted Sister had the perfect formula for an adolescent boy. These were huge hooks being punched by the cornered, oppressed underdog. And what 11-year-old boy isn't a cornered, oppressed underdog?

"We've got the right to choose it. There ain't no way we'll lose it. This is our life, this is our song … you don't know us, you don't belong. We're not gonna take it. … Oh, you're so condescending. Your goal is never-ending. We don't want nothin'--not a thing--from you."

The guitar solos are familiar to me even today. Right now--right now!--I am listening to "We're Not Gonna Take It" and miming the whammy bar dives, so entirely ingrained into my psyche did they become 30 years ago. The riffs were among the first I ever learned, and they're rock solid examples of hard rock music.

Twisted Sister were not what we've long-since come to know and dismiss as hair metal. This wasn't a band conceived of by the marketing team of a major label, assembled from girlish boys whose parts could be recorded by Rod Morgenstein, Greg Bissonette, Billy Sheenan, Steve Luthaker as long as the "band" wore their tight leather pants with the banana or rolled-up sock inserted just so. Twisted Sister had by this time been working the clubs of New York for 10 years and had released a couple of albums. They weren't apart from the now-hilarious fashions of the day, but they weren't so much in it, either. More gruesome than girly, more monster than manicured.

"Stay Hungry," the leadoff and title track, rocks. Like, really rocks. A.J. Pero and Mark Mendoza drive it hard on drums and bass, respectively, the guitars really just pounding out sustained power chords atop the rushing current of rhythm … at least until the dual-guitar solo. It, and the whole album that follows, is big. Everyone knows the cartoonish mid-tempo anthems, "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock." Other songs sped past more akin to "Stay Hungry." There were gothic comics and, yes, a power ballad.

Nobody needs a track-by-track, but I mention these songs excitedly because I haven't heard them in more than 20 years. Stay Hungry went from the greatest album of all time to one of those albums I used to like in a heartbeat, not so much because of Nirvana--I hated Nirvana--but because when contemporary music chased its northwestern nirvana, I dug into the past and obsessed on the guitar gods of the '60s and '70s, then jazz, then whatever else.

But listening again now, this is a great album. Always was, always will be. I probably won't listen to it again for many more years, if ever, because it has nothing to do with me now. The adolescent anger and frustration wore themselves out a long time ago; I'm not backed into a corner and have nobody and nothing to rebel against.

When I think about what was great in the 80's music scene, I remember the (2nd) great wave of British artists, and the one that came right to mind when I read Bubbly's post last night, was Elvis Costello. An artist still at the top of the game. I mostly bought his singles in the 70's, but he turned for the third stretch in 1980 - leaving behind most of the field of Brits*, even his mentor Nick Lowe. Get Happy!! was the first album I bought of his, and the first time I saw one of his tours. Trust was even better. Being a big fan of Country music, I was a bit surprised when he went to Nashville to record Almost Blue. He had done some country-ish tracks before but not on this level. Later the tracks he did in hope of getting George Jones to record an album with him did get out in the early 90's. When Costello wasn't on tour, he was in a studio somewhere. So right after the Nashville sessions in May 1981 that gave us Almost Blue, he started punching out demos in August - He was so prolific, when did he find the time to write? Sessions proper began in November at AIR Studios, London for what to me is his all-time masterpiece:

* Not McCartney or xtc - they deserve their own posts, as Bubbly has already pointed out one of.

Thanks for this. I was hoping more people would post like this, y'know, giving some information and detailing what they like about their favorites. Anyway, I've always been a little indifferent to the one Costello album I have, This Year's Model, but - now that I have my computer back - I'll listen to this one soon.

Thank You for coming up with an idea that lets us continue on with the Listening Project thread deal. Looks like this could go on for a bit. Open to all that want to join in.

Note: I noticed my link to the '94 CD notes didn't work right. Should have taken you right to the page. You can still find the notes by going to the link I posted, THEN click on "search for this page" - then the notes (and a bit More from other albums around the time of Imperial Bedroom) will show themselves.

Let's have fun with this. I've already got another record in mind. And glad you have your computer back. Go check out the "Primrose Hill" link I sent you. Can't put it here, cause that is not the 80's.

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...if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. ~ P.L. Travers And, let's get this out of the way now, everything I post is my opinion. ~ Will

Yeah, I should probably make what I want for this thread clear. Basically, I feel like exploring more music from the 80's and I'd like to see what other people listen to and love from this decade. If you want to give me a list, that's fine, but I'd prefer some sort of commentary on what you actually like about it. Y'know, give me your thoughts on your picks. If you want to talk about mainstream albums, songs, or artists, then go ahead. If you want to talk about obscure, strange records, I'm all ears! I love that kind of stuff.

Basically, tell me what you like, yo. I personally plan on talking about albums that I like, both old favorites and new discoveries.